A Study of Divine Vocation in Milton's Poetry and Prose

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Chapter 6

Paradise Regained

BOOK I: THE VOCATIONAL FRAMEWORK

[175] Paradise Regained begins with
an identity crisis.1 When the young Jesus arrives at the
Jordan to receive baptism, he does not seem in any way
different from those other "sons of God" thronging
the banks and awaiting the purifying touch of John the
Baptist. His obscurity and anonymity are, however,
shortlived. The "great proclaimer"
recognises him to be the Messiah--and, immediately
thereafter, there comes the divine annunciation establishing
his heavenly lineage:

on him baptized

Heaven opened, and in likeness of a dove

The Spirit descended, while the Father's voice

From heaven pronounced him his beloved Son.
(29-32)

From this point onward, the Son's identity is a problem
only for Satan.
The annunciation at Bethabara does not
lead (as one might expect) either to an explanation of the
event from the mouth of God or to Christ's own understanding
of the revelation, but rather to Satan's reaction and the
calling of a council of devils. As in Paradise
Lost, Satan is the first speaker in the poem.
Although the events at the Jordan have been factually set
down by the narrator, the first interpretation of these
events belongs to Satan--and, for Satan, the crux of the
annunciation is the identification of his adversary.
Is this "man" whom John has baptised the same as he
who defeated the rebel angels and cast them, flaming,
headlong from the height of heaven? And what did the
Father mean in proclaiming him "my beloved
Son"?--for the phrase (as Satan later observes) is
ambiguous:

[176] The Son of God . . .
bears no single sense;

The Son of God I also am, or was,

And if I was, I am; relation stands;

All men are Sons of God . . . .
(IV, 517-20)

The pattern of Satan's temptations and the inevitability
of his defeat are predetermined by the fact that he never
progresses beyond the identity problem and so is never able
to meet Jesus, who has no doubt about the sense in which he
is the "Son of God", on any common spiritual or
intellectual ground.
Aristically, Milton had to face the
problem of making the satanic position credible. If
the dramatic conflict between Christ and Satan were to
succeed aesthetically, then the confrontation in the desert
would have to be made plausible for readers already aware of
the outcome. Christ would win, of course, and Satan
would lose; but, if any degree of dramatic intensity
were to be maintained, then the satanic position must not
seem hopeless and utterly doomed from the outset.
Milton solved this difficulty in part by stressing the Son's
humanity, his fallibility, and by presenting him as an
"exalted man" rather than an incarnate deity.
But he added another and more subtle dimension to the
characterisation of his protagonists merely by permitting
Satan to speak first. Before Christ actually appears
in the poem or the nature of his mission is described by God,
Satan is allowed to express his understanding and doubts
concerning his antagonist. Thus, the reader who (like
Satan) has no clear conception of how the Son will be
presented is first introduced to the satanic viewpoint.
For an instant, the reader is forced to share Satan's
dilemma over the Son's identity and is invited, when he has
no divine viewpoint to correct his understanding, to succumb
to the self-deluding rhetoric of the Devil. Since the
reader has been given no counter-argument with which to
refute Satan's conception of Christ, it is impossible as the
poem begins to reject Satan's reasoning out-of-hand;
and the reader's initial understanding of Christ is thus
postulated on demonic casuistry. Only gradually, as
the Son fulfils his potential through responsive growth in
rejecting temptation and as the reader's developing insight
parallels Christ's own deepening awareness of his role, is
the initial and satanic view of Christ rejected.
Having been himself, in some degree, the victim of Satan's
rhetoric, the reader is in a position to accept the [177]
Devil as a formidable adversary and to suspend his disbelief
willingly, for Satan seems stronger than he really is.
Satan tells those gathered in
"gloomy consistory" to hear him that swift action
is required in the face of this new threat:

Ye see our danger on the utmost edge

Of hazard, which admits no long debate,

But must with something sudden be opposed,

Not force, but well-couched fraud, well-woven
snares,

Ere in the head of nations he appear

Their king, their leader, and supreme on earth.
(94-9)

These lines stress, of course, the urgency of opposing the
Son and, as well, the satanic conception of Christ as a
rival, a threat to the materialistic dominion of the devils.
But they also stress Satan's belief in the necessity
and ultimate efficacy of action--even if it be no more than
action for action's sake. Patience is, for Satan, an
unknown and incomprehensible state of being, and he is in no
way prepared for his encounter with the originator of
Christian heroism, where obedience is often passive.
The poem's major vocational motif2 is introduced in
the Father's monologue:

this
man born and now upgrown,

To show him worthy of his birth divine

And high prediction, henceforth I expose

To Satan;

. . . . . . . . . .

I mean

To exercise him in the wilderness,

There he shall first lay down the rudiments

Of his great warfare, ere I send him forth

To conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes,

By humiliation and strong sufferance.
(140-3,
155-60)

The trial in the desert has been engineered by God as the
means of leading Christ to an understanding of his mission
and asserting his Sonship. In the "great
duel" with Satan he will learn how he is to "save
his people from their sins" (Matthew 1: 21), and
the [178] spiritual conflict with the Devil will cause
him to "lay down the rudiments/ Of his great
warfare"--that is, to define in practice (though not
necessarily in action, for the moment) the tenets of that
Christian heroism which shall "earn salvation for the
sons of men" (167). For the Son the experience in
the wilderness is a voyage of self-discovery; and the
subject of the poem is, indeed, none other than Christ's
deepening self-awareness, his growing understanding of his
announced role as Saviour and his attainment through trial of
that self-knowledge and that vocational insight which are the
prerequisites of his sacred mission. The victory over
Sin and Death and the ultimate defeat of Satan, although
implied in the spiritual conflict and victory described in Paradise
Regained, lie beyond the direct and immediate concerns of
the poem. Before he is sent forth to conquer "the
two grand foes,/ By humiliation and strong sufferance",
the Son must be educated in the requirements of his vocation
as Messiah.
When Christ is introduced after his
Father's monologue, he is presented as "much revolving
in his breast" those vocational problems whose
resolution constitutes the substance of the poem:

How best the mighty work he might begin

Of saviour to mankind, and which way first

Publish his godlike office now mature.
(186-8)

Guided by the Holy Spirit, he leaves Bethabara where John
had baptised him and enters the desert alone to reflect upon
the meaning of the annunciation at Jordan and to come to a
fuller understanding of his role. As our initial view
of Milton's Samson had shown us a man caught in the disparity
between fact and prophecy in his career as Israel's
deliverer, so here the events at Bethabara have made Christ
acutely aware of the discrepancy between, on the one hand,
the prophecies concerning his mission and his inner
assurances of potential, and, on the other hand, the
recognition that to date he has accomplished nothing, that
his premonitions of future achievement are "ill sorting
with my present state" (200). Although he knows
himself to be the Messiah and has, with the aid of Old
Testament prophecy, arrived at a general understanding of his
mission, he does not know how he is expected to begin the
active work of redemption. The time to act, to inaugurate his
public ministry, has come; yet he cannot [179]
discover either from scripture or from within himself any
sure way to fulfil the authority he has derived from heaven.
Nevertheless, he knows himself to be under divine
protection and guidance; and so, unlike Satan--whom we
have seen to be committed to a doctrine of action--Christ is
prepared to await the decrees of heaven with patience:

by some strong motion I am led

Into this wilderness, to what intent

I learn not yet, perhaps I need not know;

For what concerns my knowledge God reveals.
(290-3)

We are reminded almost inevitably of Samson led off to
Dagon's temple by the inner summons of God's "rousing
motions". The distinction, however, is that
Christ already possesses as Paradise Regained begins
the patience, faith and humility that the hero of Samson
Agonistes earns through trial as the play progresses--and
so, while Samson's vocatio specialis asserts itself in
a sudden awareness of divine prompting just before the
catastrophe, Christ is aware of his special calling
throughout. Like Samson, however, Christ must assist
divine disposal by his own responsive choices. In the
postlapsarian world virtue is only truly virtue when it has
survived trial and temptation--and the Son's virtue in Paradise
Regained does not long remain fugitive and cloistered.
Satan arrives masquerading as "an
aged man in rural weeds" (314). After outlining
the miseries and hardships which the desert-dweller endures,
Satan invites the Son to demonstrate his divinity by turning
stones into bread, and the insidiousness of this seemingly
simple request is obscured by what Arnold Stein has happily
termed the "bait of charity":3

if
thou be the Son of God, command

That out of these hard stones be made thee bread;

So shalt thou save thyself and us relieve

With food, whereof we wretched seldom taste.
(342-5)

But Christ is not deceived either by Satan's disguise or
by the temptation which he perceives to be a trial of his
faith; and with commendable wit he turns the words
back upon the tempter with [180] the observation that
"lying is thy sustenance, thy food" (429).
The essence of the temptation is this: Satan
invites the Son to presume by performing a miracle, to act on
the knowledge that he is the Messiah but to do so without
divine approval. He asks him, that is, to take the Law
into his own hands and so to become, like Satan himself, not
only disobedient but also the rebellious rival of God.
But Christ, knowing that obedience does not always involve
activity and that he must follow God's will--whatever that
may be and whenever it may be revealed--rather than the
promptings of his own or another's will, has learned (in
Northrop Frye's words) "to will to relax the will, to
perform real acts in God's time and not pseudo-acts in his
own".4
Repulsed and "now
undisguised", Satan argues himself to be the agent of
Omnipotence, a kind of junior partner of God. In his
divinely motivated role as official tempter, he maintains, he
often freely offers his help and support to men:

lend them oft my aid,

Oft my advice by presages and signs,

And answers, oracles, portents and dreams,

Whereby they may direct their future life.
(393-6)

Satan's oracular claims elicit from the Son a positive
statement of messianic vocation: "God hath
now sent his living oracle/ Into the world, to teach his
final will." (460-1) Up to this point his
responses have been negative: he has told Satan
he will not do. Here, both for Satan and
himself, he outlines his messianic function in positive terms
and at the same time asserts the alternative which he will
oppose to the satanic exhortation to presumptuous action:
he is not a free agent but is rather God's
"living oracle" sent to teach God's will and not to
indulge his own whims. In declaring that he is God's
"living oracle", the Son unequivocally proclaims
that he is the Messiah and thus solves the identity problem
which has plagued Satan since the annunciation at Bethabara.
Satan, however, is unwilling to accept the
identification. Only an outright miracle--such as the
turning of stones into bread--would suffice to eradicate or
cast uncertainty upon his assiduously fostered delusion
concerning the Son's identity.
Satan terminates and at the same time
extends the scope of his attack on Christ's faith with the
designing suggestion that the Son [181] should imitate
his Father:

Thy father, who is holy, wise and pure,

Suffers the hypocrite or atheous priest

To tread his sacred courts, and minister

About his altar, handling holy things,

Praying or vowing, and vouchsafed his voice

To Balaam reprobate, a prophet yet

Inspired; disdain not such access to me.
(486-92)

The request seems innocent enough--but two important
principles are involved. First, if the Son grants
willing audience and even tolerance to Satan, then his
obedience will be to the will of the Devil rather than to
that of God. Second, obedience to God and imitation of
God, though yoked together by satanic implication, are not
identical motives to action. In asking the Son to
imitate his Father's tolerance and mercy, Satan is inviting
him to usurp and employ, as his own, attributes and functions
pertaining to the Father alone. Undeceived by the
tempter's efforts to draw him into an act of presumption by
insistence upon what Satan erroneously supposes to be the
inalienable rights of divine Sonship, Christ counters the
assault on his faith by an "act" of passive
obedience:

Thy coming hither, though I know thy scope,

I bid not or forbid; do as thou find'st

Permission from above; thou canst not more.
(494-6)

And, uncertain how next to proceed against so formidable
an opponent, a bewildered and (for the moment) defeated
Satan, "bowing low/ His grey dissimulation, disappeared/
Into thin air diffused" (497-9).

BOOK II: "LAWFUL DESIRES OF NATURE"

Book II opens with the reaction of the Apostles to
Christ's disappearance after the annunciation at Bethabara.
Their doubt is not occasioned by uncertainty over
Christ's identity--they [182] know him to be the
promised Saviour; rather, it springs from their
imperfect understanding of the messianic mission. As
with the Son himself (cf. I, 196-293), the Apostles'
incomplete awareness of the divine plan precludes their
understanding fully how the Messiah is to inaugurate and
accomplish the task of universal redemption. Unlike
Christ, however, whom the Father had hailed as "This
perfect man, by merit called my Son" (I, 166), the
Disciples are average and therefore very fallible mortals.
And, whereas Christ had faced the vocational
uncertainty of how best to prosecute the "authority .
. . derived from heaven" (I, 289) by trusting in God
for direction and resigning himself willingly to the active
inactivity of standing and awaiting his Father's commands,
the impatient Disciples respond to Christ's disappearance,
firstly, by ever-increasing doubts and, secondly, by
unnecessary and fruitless activity. With diligence and
zeal they searched for their "lost"
Messiah--"but returned in vain" (24). Then,
having failed to find Christ and still unable to account for
his disappearance, they gather "in a cottage low"
and pray that God will return the Messiah to them. But
suddenly, in mid-sentence, the tone and direction of the
speech changes, by abrupt peripeteia, from doubt to certainty
and from a prayer for divine intervention to a recognition of
the need on man's part for faith and patience:

But let us wait; thus far [God] hath
performed,

Sent his anointed, and to us revealed him

. . . . . .
. . . .

he will not fail

Nor will withdraw him now, nor will recall,

Mock us with his blest sight, then snatch him
hence

Soon we shall see our hope, our joy return.
(49-50, 54-7)

Allowing for the fact that the Apostles operate in a lower
stratum of awareness than Christ and that they therefore
entertain doubts and fears foreign to his perfect humanity,
their choric planctus nonetheless parallels, with some
thematic variation and change of emphasis, the Son's long
vocational meditation in Book I. And their patient
submission to the divine will, their resolve to lay "all
our fears/ . . . on his providence" (53-4), is
the same in substance and intent as Christ's earlier
self-abnegating statement of absolute trust (I, 290-3).
Like the Son, the Apostles have learned to [183]
will to relax the will, a spiritual state which is the apex
of self-knowledge and the apotheosis of human potential.
Mary's soliloquy follows, mutatis
mutandis, the same pattern as the Apostles' monologue.
Mary is initially troubled by her son's unexplained
disappearance, and she senses, too, the tension between
prophecy and accomplished fact in his career. The
"troubled thoughts" raised in her heart are,
however, soon quelled by the same patient faith that had
resolved the Apostles' doubts: "But I to
wait with patience am inured." (102) And so it is
"with thoughts/ Meekly composed" that Mary
patiently "awaited the fulfilling" (107-8) of the
prophecies concerning her son.
After Mary's monologue, the scene shifts
to the "middle region of thick air" where Satan
addresses "all his potentates in council" (117-18).
His speech, like those of the Apostles and Mary, opens
on a note of uncertainty and doubt. Typically,
however, and in contrast to the other speakers in Book II,
Satan's doubt resolves itself into a determination to
act--and he terminates the council with a renewed commitment
to assertive self-expression: "I shall let
pass/ No advantage, and his strength as oft assay"
(233-4).
Meanwhile, the Son has spent forty days
of fasting, "with holiest meditations fed":

All his great work to come before him set;

How to begin, how to accomplish best

His end of being on earth, and mission high.
(112-14)

Significantly, these vocational ruminations repeat the
pattern to which I have drawn attention in the earlier
speeches of the other characters in Book II. The Son
begins with a rhetorical questioning of Providence:

Where will this end? Four times ten days I
have passed

Wandering this woody maze, and human food

Nor tasted, nor had appetite;

. . . . . . . . . .

But now I feel I hunger, which declares,

Nature hath need of what she asks . . . .
(245-7, 252-3)

But any vestige of self-centredness or doubt is quickly
replaced [184] by selfless obedience:
"yet God/ Can satisfy that need some other way,/ Though
hunger still remain." (253-5)
The thematic pattern stressed in the
opening half of Book II, then, is that of doubt and
impatience yielding to faith and patience. Each of the
characters--the Apostles, Mary, Satan, and Christ--begins
with an expression of doubt, but each, except Satan, succeeds
in denying the importunate claims of his individual will and
placing his trust in the divine will which, he knows, will be
revealed to him in God's own time. The pattern is
paradigmatic of the thematic development within the epic as a
whole. Paradise Regained is concerned with the
annihilation of the self and the stages by which the
Son--whose experience is exemplary--grows toward the final
attainment of this ideal of theological "negative
capability". The protagonist of the poem is more
than a symbol of salvation; he is an exemplar, a model
for human imitation. The reader is being informed that
he must participate in the Son's agon in a real,
rather than in a merely ritualistic, way; and it is
the function of the monologues of the Apostles and Mary to
remind the reader of his co-operative responsibility for his
own salvation, by reinforcing the central thematic pattern
(seen in Christ's responses to Satan) of progressively
devalued self-assertion. Satan, of course, is intended
as a negative example: his wilfulness,
contrasted with the Son's selfless passivity, makes him God's
rival; and his frustration and ultimate fate are
warnings of the inevitable lot awaiting those who commit
themselves to the delusion of self-sufficiency.
Over half-way through Book II, the
tempter reappears to renew his assaults. Reminding the
Son of his hunger and urging his "right" to
"all created things" (324), Satan causes an
exquisite banquet to appear out of thin air. The
banquet is designed to satisfy what Satan argues to be all
"Lawful desires of nature" (230)5 and therefore comprehends all sensory and
sensual gratifications. The satisfaction of a bodily
appetite in moderation is not in itself a sin, but it may
become so if an ethical or moral issue is involved. In
"temperately" declining to partake of the banquet,
the Son bases his refusal not so much on the gift itself as
on the source of the gift and on the satanic implications
that, if Christ eats, he thereby declares his
"right" to all created things (II, 378-84).
Moreover, since Satan--in his customary materialistic
manner--has offered to assuage only physical hunger, the Son,
who is "fed with better thoughts that feed/ Me hung'ring
more to [185] do my Father's will" (1258-9),
trenchantly demands of Satan, "And with my hunger what
hast thou to do?" (389)
The tempter's next appeal is based
directly on the identity and vocational issues. How
does Christ propose to come to power in Israel without
powerful allies and riches adequate to retain an armed force?
Satan, therefore, counsels the amassing of riches and
is, of course, prepared to show the Son--if he will sacrifice
his patience and obedience--precisely how such wealth is to
be gained. The Son readily disparages the offer of
wealth without virtue, valour and wisdom:
"Wealth without these three is impotent." (433)
True kingship depends not on riches but on virtue and
wisdom, and it is available to everyone, for it is nothing
other than man's sovereignty over himself--a sovereignty
which becomes yet more kingly when it serves as the means of
leading others to self-knowledge and the knowledge of God:

to
guide nations in the way of truth

By saving doctrine, and from error lead

To know, and, knowing worship God aright,

Is yet more kingly . . . .
(473-6)

This statement is the second positive vocational assertion
in the poem. At the end of Book I, Christ had declared
himself God's prophet. Here, at the close of Book II,
he extends his vocational awareness by declaring himself his
Father's priest, whose function is to teach--both by precept
and example--the doctrine of salvation and to lead men from
darkness into light.

BOOK III: GLORY, FALSE ZEAL, AND PARTHIA

While there is no break in the action between Books II and
III, Satan's offers--which proceed through a scale of worldly
values--become less material in the third book. The
temptations of the second book concentrate on the lowest and
most concrete objects of worldly attainment:
bodily luxury (in all its forms) and material wealth.
In the third book the emphasis shifts to appeals which are
more abstract and, correspondingly, more subtle.
Supporting his case with the youthful
accomplishments of such military heroes as Alexander, Scipio
Africanus and Julius Caesar, [186] Satan opens Book
III by arguing that it is time for the Son, who has displayed
greater virtue and personal integrity than any of these pagan
conquerors, to seek glory in action: "Thy
years are ripe, and over-ripe" (31). Essentially,
the temptation is to presumptuous action and involves the
usurpation of praises due only to the Father. Refusing
to play God, the Son scorns the brutish fame of conquerors
and the praise of the ignorant multitude. Against the
illusory and transitory glory of earth he juxtaposes the
"true glory and renown" that is spiritual and
eternal, the fame of heroes who have achieved true renown
without seeking it:

This is true glory and renown, when God,

Looking on the earth, with approbation marks

The just man, and divulges him through heaven

To all his angels, who with true applause

Recount his praises; thus he did to Job .
. . . (60-4)

Glory is God's gift to the deserving and is earned by
patience and obedience to the divine will rather than by
self-assertive and self-motivated action. Christ is
the Son and instrument of God, but his right to that title
and mission depends upon his obedience to his omnipotent
Father's will.
The satanic frustration, which increases
as Christ rejects each successive temptation, is the result
of genuine confusion on the tempter's part. It is, for
example, inconceivable to Satan that the Son should scorn so
lightly and categorically his offer of glory. As an
abstract object of ambition, glory--which Satan has
sacrificed all in an effort to gain--is the highest
attainment of which the satanic mind can conceive.
Glory is the reward of power and is exacted by God, who is
Power itself, from all creation. Satan's God is a
tyrant consumed by vanity, who wields his absolute power with
arbitrary indifference; and the Son, Satan reasons,
should be the reflection of his Father:

Think not so slight of glory; therein
least

Resembling thy great Father: he
seeks glory,

And for his glory all things made, all things

Orders and governs . . . .
(109-12)

[187] The unchecked absolutism, which
Satan's distorted view of God and His glory assumes
axiomatically, is an object of envy; indeed, it had
been envy (coupled with pride) that had motivated his
abortive rebellion against the Creator. At the same
time, however, God's absolute power is--as Satan had learned
to his sorrow--incompatible with any rival authority.
And Satan hopes that with demonic guidance the Son may be
tricked into repeating the satanic experience. If he
can excite envy of the Father's power and glory in the Son,
then Christ, too, will become God's rival. But Christ,
seeking God's glory and not his own, easily rejects the offer
of glory.
In all of his temptations Satan
fails--but he never really understands why he fails.
It is his inability to anticipate and, after the
event, to comprehend his failures that accounts for his
growing frustration and confusion. And the explanation
of his ill success, although he himself does not realise it,
is apparent in his "confession" in Book III:

all hope is lost

Of my reception into grace; what worse?

For where no hope is left, is left no fear;

If there be worse, the expectation more

Of worse torments me than the feeling can.

I would be at the worst; worst is my port,

My harbour and my ultimate repose,

The end I would attain, my final good.
(204-11)

There is, it seems at first, a certain nobility in this
unexpected confession, and the extent of self-knowledge
revealed surprises the reader who has anticipated no such
despairing admission of guilt from Satan. It was, no
doubt, a surprise to the Son as well. And it was
intended to be so--for Satan, following his confession with a
plea for intercession, expected to catch the Son off-guard
and so trick him into exercising his mediatorial office
prematurely and thus presumptuously, and into extending mercy
(which is God's function) to one for whom both repentance and
forgiveness are alike impossible.
Although designed as a ruse, Satan's
confession reveals much about his distorted reasoning and
explains in large measure his ill [188] success with
Christ. The importance of his words becomes apparent
when they are set beside an instructive passage of satanic
soliloquy in Paradise Lost:

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,

Farewell remorse: all good to me is
lost;

Evil be thou my good; by thee at least

Divided empire with heaven's king I hold

By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign.
(IV, 108-12)

Satan, it is clear, is not entirely dissatisfied with his
lot: ruling in Hell and on Earth as well is
better than serving in Heaven. The precondition of
satanic dominion, however, is the espousing of evil and the
rejection of good. And Satan's view of himself is
Manichean rather than Augustinian; in adopting evil as
his good, Satan establishes himself--at least in his own
mind--as a second positive cosmic force existing in
opposition to Providence. Evil is not merely a void
created by the absence of good; it is a positive
thing, and the satanic "empire" is the alternative
to Heaven. Thus, when the tempter in Paradise
Regained says,

I would be at the worst; worst is my port,

My harbour and my ultimate repose,

The end I would attain, my final good,

he is obliquely arguing his claim to infernal dominion and
his desire to consolidate his holdings. But his
devotion to evil and his substitution of evil for good have
hopelessly distorted his view of his antagonist. He
thinks of the Son as his rival, a potential usurper, and
attempts to treat with him as he would with a would-be Satan.
Since he has inverted the relative values of good and
evil, Satan is unable to appreciate either the Son's nature
or mission, and his temptations are doomed from the outset
because they are aimed at an alter ego rather than at
an opposite.
The subject of Book III of Paradise
Regained is kingship, a subject anticipated in Christ's
statement about true sovereignty (kingship over the self) at
the end of Book II. Kingship is the third and final aspect of
Christ's office, the other two being his roles as prophet
(Book I) and as priest (Book II).6 Satan knows from scripture that Christ
is to rule Israel, and he interprets the [189]
prophecy literally to mean that the Son is "ordained/ To
sit upon thy father David's throne" (152-3). And
so, when the Son rejects the abstract theory of kingship and
the necessity of immediate action to obtain his throne which
Satan proposes, the tempter's literal-mindedness suggests
that real and concrete examples of "regal arts,/ And
regal mysteries" may have more appeal than mere theory.
Taking Christ up into a mountain, therefore, he
displays to his view all the powerful cities and kingdoms of
the earth, settling finally on Parthia, the foremost symbol
of military strength and efficiency. But
"Israel's true king" has already explained to his
uncomprehending antagonist that his reign is to be spiritual
rather than temporal. Here he is content to observe
that all arms are vanity, an "argument/ Of human
weakness rather than of strength" (401-2); his
own weapons are spiritual, and his time to wield them and to
establish his kingdom in men's souls has not yet come.

BOOK IV: ROME, ATHENS, AND THE TEMPLE

The offer of Parthia is quickly followed by that of Rome,
the symbol of opulence, luxury and decadence. The
wealth and power of Rome, argues Satan, are the keys to
domination of the world. Satan's literal
interpretation of the prophecies concerning the Son's
messianic vocation have caused him once again to offer Christ
the wrong kind of throne. Nevertheless, the repeated
and uncompromising literalism of the tempter's understanding
of the prophesied kingdom succeeds in drawing from the Son a
further positive vocational assertion:

Know therefore when my season comes to sit

On David's throne, it shall be like a tree

Spreading and overshadowing all the earth,

Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash

All monarchies besides throughout the world,

And of my kingdom there shall be no end.
(146-51)

Satanic obtuseness had earlier forced Christ to articulate
his functions as prophet and priest; here the Son
defines, both for Satan and himself, the nature and aim of
his ordained kingship, a [190] spiritual vocation
which depends neither on time nor space and which is
concerned with inner rather than external or worldly
sovereignty.
It is at this point that Satan both
impudently and, in terms of his own success, inopportunely
makes clear to Christ the reason for the trial of the
kingdoms:

All these which in a moment thou behold'st,

The kingdoms of the world to thee I give

. . . . . . . . . .

if thou wilt fall down,

And worship me as thy superior lord.
(162-3, 166-7)

The boldness of the assertion is occasioned by the
desperateness of the tempter's case. Christ responds to the
reiterated offer of the worldly kingdoms simply by pointing
to the necessity of patient obedience to the will of Him who
is alone the one superior Lord. Obedience to the Law
and patient endurance have throughout been the Son's
spiritual weapons against the formidable batteries of satanic
casuistry; and Christ's assertion (IV, 181) that the
tempter shall rue this bold and blasphemous request for
worship is a reminder that the Son's passivity will give way,
shortly, to the prophesied activity of bruising the serpent's
head.
With meiosis heightened by the irony of
satanic obtusity, the tempter observes that Christ
"seem'st otherwise inclined/ Than to a worldly
crown" (212-13). Satan's belated recognition that
Christ's kingdom is not a temporal one leads directly to the
offer of Athens, "the eye of Greece, mother of arts/ And
eloquence" (240-1). To this point, Satan's
temptations have relied on the public glory to be gained from
wealth and power; but there remains, as he comes to
see, a type of eminence which by its very nature appeals only
to a few--the glory of knowledge and intellectual
achievement, a form of glory best represented by ancient
Athens. Nevertheless, Satan's perverted understanding
leads him to treat the supreme accomplishments of Athenian
culture--its literature, oratory, and philosophy--as mere
stepping-stones to worldly power:

Be famous then

By wisdom; as thy empire must extend,

[191] So let extend thy mind o'er
all the world,

In knowledge, all things in it comprehend,

All knowledge is not couched in Moses' law,

The Pentateuch or what the prophets wrote,

The Gentiles also know, and write, and teach

To admiration, led by nature's light;

And with the Gentiles much thou must converse,

Ruling them by persuasion as thou mean'st . .
. .
(221-30)

This temptation is the most sophisticated that Satan has
been able to formulate, for it appeals precisely to that
vocational desire that Christ had spoken of in his first
meditation: "By winning words to conquer
willing hearts,/ And make persuasion do the work of
fear." (I, 222-3) But the Son, undeceived,
rejects the offer of pagan learning, "sagely"
observing that

he who receives

Light from above, from the fountain of light,

No other doctrine needs, though granted true.
(288-90)

In other words, those men who, like Christ and the Old
Testament prophets, are God's special servants, are divinely
taught; their knowledge is the gift of inspiration,
and, for them, that sort of learning which is obtained by
"nature's light" is superfluous, often misleading,
and invariably incomplete. The epistemological premise
of Paradise Regained is that conventional or natural
wisdom--like the conventional sorts of power and glory
offered earlier by Satan--is entirely inadequate for the
Son's understanding and prosecution of his vocation.
Still unable to understand the nature of
the Son's prophesied kingdom--"Real or allegoric I
discern not" (390)--Satan returns Christ to the
wilderness where, abandoning persuasion for the tactics of
fear, he afflicts the Son with "ugly dreams" and
the violence of a fierce storm. In the morning, Satan,
"Desperate of better course", removes Christ to the
pinnacle of the temple at Jerusalem, where the threatened
violence of the nocturnal storm is actualised:

There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand
upright

[192] Will ask thee skill; I
to thy Father's house

Have brought thee, and highest placed, highest is
best,

Now show thy progeny; if not to stand,

Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God .
. . . (551-5)

The Arch Fiend is constrained at last to resort to
physical violence in an effort to force Christ either to
assert his divine Sonship (by casting himself safely down) or
to reveal himself as an impostor (by plunging ignominiously
to his death). But the limited scope of Satan's
understanding proves inadequate once more to anticipate the
Son's response--

To whom thus Jesus: Also it is
written,

Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said, and stood--
(560-1)

and it is Satan himself who, "smitten with
amazement" (562), falls headlong from the temple's
spire.
The act of standing on the pinnacle both
reaffirms and at the same time resolves the central
structural and thematic pattern of the poem, that of a
temptation to presumptuous self-assertion opposed by
self-abnegating passivity and trusting obedience. In
placing Christ on the pinnacle, Satan means to force the Son
into performing a self-assertive act; but,
surprisingly, Christ responds by manifesting once again that
selfless patience and obedience to the Father that has
characterised his replies to the tempter throughout the poem.
Here, however, the Son's passivity is more significant:
the decision to stand on the pinnacle, to confirm
obedience by avoiding presumptuous action, is a decision
beyond purely human accomplishment--for it is impossible to
stand upon the spire without aid. The fact that Christ
does stand, thereby performing the humanly impossible, marks
the point at which the Son, having annihilated his individual
and selfish will, is subsumed into the Father's will, of
which he is henceforward the instrument.
In vocational terms, Christ's journey of
self-discovery and self-understanding ends, paradoxically,
with the total denial of the self. It is only as a
result of his supreme act of obedient passivity on the
pinnacle that he is able to enter finally upon his mission.
He is carried down from the temple by angels, who end [193]
their hymn of praise with these words:

Hail Son of the Most High, heir of both worlds,

Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work

Now enter, and begin to save mankind.
(633-5)

Action, formerly the essence of temptation, is now, as the
Son embarks on his messianic mission, enjoined as a
vocational necessity. And, as the curtain falls on the
last act, the "undoubted Son of God" slips
unobtrusively away to begin the task of transforming prophecy
into fact.

Notes

[Click on asterisk (*) at the end of a note to return to the
point you left in the text]

The depth of my indebtedness to Barbara
Lewalski's Milton's Brief Epic. The Genre,
Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (London and
Providence, 1966) will become apparent as this chapter
progresses. *

I am concerned primarily with the Son's vocatio
specialis as Messiah; however, the Son's
"general vocation" and his renovation are also
important themes in the poem: "What
illuminates the significance of the ministry is [the
Son's] developing response to the call as it comes to him
from his meditation on the recorded experience of his own
people; and each of the poem's four books will be
found to centre on and conclude with some significant
aspect of the process of natural and supernatural
renovation as De Doctrina attempts to define these."
(Barker, "Structural and Doctrinal Pattern"
[cf. Chap.4, n 7], p. 181) *

In fact, however, as Michael Fixler has
shown, Satan's banquet is knowingly designed to tempt
Christ into violating Jewish dietary law:
see Fixler, "The Unclean Meats of the Mosaic Law and
the Banquet Scene in Paradise Regained," MLN,
70 (1955), 573-7.*